For anyone who has ever hit a baseball, or gone to sleep with the rise and fall of home runs in his mind, here at last is the book that unlocks the secret to baseball's hold over our hearts. Robert Mayer's hilarious and heartbreaking memoir of growing up baseball-obsessed chronicles another kind of ballplayer altogether. Mayer's star is the boy who was too skinny, too small, and otherwise too genetically unfit ever to become what he really wanted to be: a major league great. Relating his own tribulations as a would-be shortstop from the Bronx, Mayer shows how the poetry of the game has influenced not only the fantasies but the crucial facts of his life. He also shows that he is not alone. Here are intimate takes on a half-century of baseball history as viewed through the clouded lenses of dreamers. We meet the teenage Tiger fan who worships failed minor leaguers, the middle-aged amateur whose greatest gift is to hear his name included in a fictional lineup, the suicidal Mets aficionado who can't kill himself because he needs to know who's going to win the next game. Mayer offers a Holden Caulfield-like view of baseball as life and an explanation of why, for so many men, these two things are inextricably linked. Here, too, are the women who put up with these men -- and some who can't. Funny and moving, neurotic and necessary, Notes of a Baseball Dreamer is about what we can and can't let go of in our lives -- and the things that will never let go of us.